A LexisNexis Blog

Sovereign Debt: Follow the Paper Trail

With the economy of Greece teetering on the brink of collapse, and other industrialized nations throughout the world — Japan, Brazil, Spain, Italy, Russia, the U.S. — swimming in red ink, the issue of sovereign debt has been getting more attention than ever lately. This chart from The Economist offers a snapshot of the change in debt over the last decade, and notes that the problem has increased disproportionately in Europe. Indeed, many commentators have focused on what they are calling the “European Sovereign Debt Crisis.”

Image by NASA. Some rights reserved.

On the other hand, for some nations the buzzword is not sovereign debt but sovereign wealth, as we see from this article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail.

As we’ve noted before in the pixels of this blog, nations that wish to peddle sovereign bonds in the U.S. market must file form S-B with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You can search for form S-B on our SEC Filings page (do not confuse it with the almost identically titled form SB, no hyphen).

You can read more about sovereign debt, sovereign bonds, and sovereign wealth by searching for any of those terms on our Agency Materials page.